(Warning: A whole lot of cliché lies below.)

Toby is away. He left yesterday on a midnight train to Georgia. A little over a week ago, Toby and I stopped going out. We did this after we realized we were spending hundreds of dollars on mediocre meals while taking part in conversations with people we should have been giving a better ear and a calmer mind to. This, coupled with the sinking sensation that I’m throwing away the better years of my life, is why I demanded myself change.

Yesterday, I purchased Krackauer’s book Into the Wild. I read Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven years ago. I’m not sure why I never picked up Into the Wild. But I’m finding the timing is unbearably humorous, almost suffocatingly so.

This post, like the thousands that lie before it, will prove stagnant and floppy. Like a fish out of water it will appear to have life and the desire to survive. In the end I know it will only gasp at the idea, grasp at the idea.

What I’d really like to write about is how unfulfilled I am with my career and how little I do everyday for anyone. I’d like to tell everyone how meaningless I find the work that I do—day in, day out. But the irony is I find that I don’t have the time. How does one write about how uninspired they are? It’s true. I feel a little dead inside. I have these moments where I’ll just be sitting on the couch staring off toward the television set and suddenly I’m a 75-year-old woman sitting on a toilet wondering why I didn’t pay more attention to that little voice, the one I suppressed for so long. And the older I get the more patience I lose and the more resentful I become with myself. I’m teetering on that edge, the one between becoming a reclusive and buying into the game called “work”. The game that includes hundreds of pointless meetings, a thousand of irrelevant e-mail, a billion of needless commas, a million of mundane conversations, and hundreds of insignificant exchanges. All for what? Really? All for what? How does this not occur to everyone all the time? I need to figure out a way to remember not to remember.

Some people flee from society and wander aimlessly in search of actual meaning. They enter places no one has ever seen before. I can’t help but think that with all the vastness, one must become more and more aware of how insignificant and tiny they are. And as most of the world sits back and silently judges them, calling them filthy cowards, punks, freeloaders, and the dregs of society, they wander, unscathed. Is there envy in the terms used to describe them? Is there envy in our judgment of others? I spit on the people who drive up the shoulder getting ahead in the line all the while helping to create a bigger traffic jam for the rest of us. Meanwhile, I envy their ability to justify becoming such assholes. Outdoor cats enter the wild when they aren’t feeling right. They set off in search of peace. Does the reclusive set out in search of an ultimate loneliness? Does the reclusive search for a certain and specific way in which to die?

This thought alone is why I’m terrified of letting go. This idea alone is why I can find envy in the guy on the corner with nothing. This concept alone is why I don’t get raises, discover promotions, or purchase a thousand dollar wardrobe to impress those who disrespect. This thought alone is why I feel smug at times and disgruntled at others.

“Maybe there is a God above. But all I’ve ever learned from love. Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you. And it’s not a cry that you hear at night. It’s not somebody who’s seen the light. It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”

Although it may not seem so, I feel pretty content with my restlessness today. I feel like I’m finally getting to know it. Today, my restlessness has become the reclusive in search of new ground and the direction in which to set myself free.